The company also plans to begin construction of a Windsor steel processing facility this year.

Jan. 30, 2014

Philanthropic efforts

While Cargill keeps a low profile regarding its research, it takes an active role in the community. Since June, Canola Cares has donated more than $37,000 throughout the city, including a community garden that yielded 1,121 pounds of food to the Food Bank for Larimer County. Cargill employees have volunteered more than 193 hours since June. They cleared debris from the WOLF Sanctuary, donated $5,000 to the Long Term Recovery Fund after the September floods and worked alongside AmeriCorps workers to reseed hillsides in Rist Canyon after the 2012 wildfires.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

Inside an array of nondescript greenhouses on Fort Collins’ East Drake Road, tiny specks of pollen grains are treated to grow into plants that will be cross-pollinated to combine their high-yield and specialty oil traits.

If this genetic match game is successful, oils produced from these plants may one day make their way into the snacks, sweets and other products we eat and cook with every day. More than 40 employees work here, yet the size and scope of their work goes largely unnoticed.

This is Cargill’s Specialty Seeds & Oils division, part of one of the largest and oldest privately held food, agriculture, financial, manufacturing and industrial companies in the world.

Inside, workers develop and cultivate seeds and crops that can be turned into stable, heart healthy oils for cooking and eating.

The 30-acre facility is about to start a $10 million project to grow its footprint in Fort Collins. In addition to a 38,000-square-foot expansion of its greenhouses, seed storage and offices in Fort Collins, work on a new 67,000-square-foot steel processing facility is expected to be under construction in the next couple months in Windsor.

The company has been part of Fort Collins’ fabric since 1963 when it opened its High Plains wheat breeding program. As eating habits changed, Cargill began the transformation into specialty oils in 1994 and worked with McDonald’s in 2002 to develop a new cooking oil to decrease the trans fatty acids in the fast food giant’s french fries.

Today, Cargill supplies Culver’s and all Disney properties with oils. You’ll also find the oils in Stove Top stuffing, Goldfish crackers, Nature Valley, Fiber One and a variety of other products. Cargill researchers are working on the next generation of Clear Valley canola oils, a high-stability oil suitable for cooking with reduced saturates and zero trans fats per serving.

With an eight-year turnaround from research to yield, Cargill’s expansion in Fort Collins will reach into the next generation of oils to meet consumer needs including Omega 3 for brain and eye development, said Lorin DeBonte of Cargill Specialty Seeds & Oils.

(Page 2 of 3)

Cargill is researching ways to extract Omega 3 from land-based plants rather than fish, DeBonte said.

But Cargill’s oils, considered specialty crops, compete for land against the more common commodity crops. “How to manage the genetics to survive in that climate” means Cargill’s crop yields need to be as robust as commodity crops, LeBonte said. “Otherwise, why would a grower want to grow (our) product rather than the commodity crop? We see that as our competition.”

CSU connection

Cargill’s Specialty Seeds & Oils has a special relationship with Colorado State University’s agriculture program, funding post-doctoral students, paying for employees to get advanced degrees there or footing the bill for international speakers to come to campus.

“They are very important to the CSU community,” said John McKay, an assistant professor in CSU’s Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest Management department.

“The relationship started by the fact that we are here and we train people in things they need, so they end up hiring a lot of people who have been through CSU and they have an appreciation for the fact that we’re here and have this expertise,” McKay said.

Cargill donates about $5,000 a year so the College of Agriculture can bring in researchers so “students are exposed to research that’s not happening here,” he said. “It’s a really important feature of our training that we appreciate.”

Growing in Windsor

Cargill announced in late November it would open a 67,000-square-foot steel processing facility in the Great Western Industrial Park in Windsor by the end of this year.

The Windsor town board approved a $239,000 tax-incentive package that mostly includes rebates on construction permits and fees, said Dathan Dunn, business development manager for Cargill’s metals division.

This steel processing facility will be the eighth of its kind for Cargill, with the last one being built in the early 1990s. The company, which has shipped product into the Denver, Northern Colorado, Wyoming area for years, started to look for ways to get its products closer to customers, Dunn said in a telephone interview from Minneapolis.

(Page 3 of 3)

“We found Fort Collins and liked it,” he said. “We had the specialty oils unit there, it fit the bill, was on the interstate and we have a lot of customers that travel that corridor.”

As time moved on and the business model proved viable, “it was time to step into a bigger commitment,” Dunn said.

As any Realtor will tell you, however, large tracts of industrial land are not easy to come by in Northern Colorado. “You can’t just go out and buy a large industrial building that is rail serviced and crane serviced.”

As Cargill assessed the market, Dunn said they looked toward the Broe Group, an already familiar name to Cargill, that is developing the Great Western Industrial Park.

Construction of Cargill’s facilities at the industrial park is expected to begin in a month or two, Dunn said.

Cargill’s steel processing facility will import hot steel coils and cut them into rectangles in a variety of widths and lengths that will be used in products such as roll-off trash containers, semi-truck trailers, production tanks at well heads, fracking and storage tanks, and even towing hitches.